king talk

The idea is simple and nice. Take a wind mill and put some colorful LED lights on it so everybody can see. The so called Siemens SuperStar was created by multimedia artist Michael Pendry for the company and was displayed till January in Munich (close to the Allianz Arena). Pendry convinced both Siemens and the Stadtwerke München (Munich City Utilities) to let him install this art piece on one of the utilities’ wind turbines. It was created to showcase and promote sustainable energy and green innovation. Passing cars on the motorway could find this a little bit distracting, but it looks good.

9.000 OSRAM LEDs were superglued to a wind turbine in just under two weeks. Thanks to smart energy systems like smart grids and power highways, it only consumes as much energy as a hair dryer! The 9.000 LEDs put out as much light as 20.000 Christmas candles.

I think it´s pretty amazing that a project like this was done in Munich, a city which is known as a conservative city, but Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, has been an enthusiastic proponent of the energy-efficient spectacle from the start and hopes his city will be the first of its size to meet all energy requirements from renewable sources.

via Andreas Brendle

continue reading …

Tomorrow the envis team will be hanging around at Schwäbisch Gmünd to have a look at the latest work from the students. We expect some innovative concepts at the media lab like the last years project from Jonas Heuer and Jürgen Gräf. Notput is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting.

All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones. The idea is pretty simple and the experimental approach is enjoyable and informative at the same time.

Why don´t we use tools like that at school?

New year, new weave! The third issue of this well done magazine about interactive design is available in stores. Envis precisely is featured from page 50 – 53 within the article about the Center for New Technologies at the Deutsche Museum (Munich). But there´s more to it. I held an interview with Arduino co-founder David A. Mellis about Open Source Hardware. You can read more about at page 106. All things considered this issue is one of the best weave. It´s nice to see and feel the development process which is going on right now. I like the broad range from web development to interactive installations and design science. So grab yourself a new weave, it´s worth beeing read. At this time Philipp is preparing the next article about a visual synthesizer. You will find it out at weave 02.10 coming out on 15th march 2010…

We spent the better part of last weekend in Graz with the fine students of FH JOANNEUMs information design department. They were taking part in a workshop on Processing and the general idea of computed and generative design.

Our basic idea was to present the students with snippets of code that can be combined in different ways in order to foster creative use of programming languages.

The outcomes quite frankly exceeded our expectations. You can explore them in their full variety in this flickr set.

Congratulations to all participants for what you achieved:
Christoph Mauerhofer
Franz Ferdinand Kubin
Gianna Tatzel
Julian Kogler
Lisa Weishäupl
Magdalena Kahr
Moritz Rzehak
Roland Mariacher
Thomas Raggam

We hope you enjoyed the two days as much as we did!

We received a mail from a friend this morning, who told us that our Arduino Icon Redesign was brought to life. The Massimo Banzi´s students of CIID (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) baked a cake based on the icon for the Arduino IDE.

And Massimo Banzi seemed to be surprised, but happy. How long did he spent eating this Arduino Mega Cake…?

via Arduino Blog